It the mid-1990s, those of us closely
following the cover-up of the obvious murder of Deputy White House Counsel
Vincent W. Foster, Jr., consisted of a rather small fraternity. At the
very heart of the fraternity was the conservative media watchdog group,
Accuracy in Media (AIM), and its director, the late Reed Irvine. Christopher Ruddy, the one American reporter consistently
writing critically on the Foster case at that time, has claimed publicly that
it was Irvine who first interested him in the matter (although he told me that
it was an unnamed reporter from the conservative Washington Times who
was not permitted to write honestly about it by his editors). It was
through AIM that I came into contact with the New York-based writer, Richard
Poe, with whom I had several telephone conversations.

My dealings with AIM were primarily through
their media director, the late Bernard
Yoh. I gathered that that was the case with
Poe as well. Depending upon one’s perspective, that may or may not be a
good thing, because we now know that had he talked to Irvine his conversation
would have been recorded and saved. Irvine taped all his telephone
conversations without alerting the person on the other end that he was doing
so, which is quite legal in Washington, DC. Those conversations are now
making their way onto YouTube.

Perhaps the most important and the most
exciting one to listen to yet is with the Washington bureau chief for the
respected Sunday Telegraph of London, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. It took
place less than a week after Evans-Pritchard had published his article based
upon his interview of the elusive witness, Patrick Knowlton, who had stopped to
relieve himself at the secluded Fort Marcy Park on the afternoon of July 20,
1993, when Foster already lay dead near the back of the park. His name
had appeared in the police report on the case misspelled as “Nolton” and the
address given for him was also wrong. Ambrose-Pritchard had tracked him
down by asking around the small mountain community of Etlan, Virginia, where
Knowlton had been headed to a vacation home on that fateful day in July.
Knowlton learned from Evans-Pritchard that the FBI had falsified his testimony
in a couple of crucial ways. What seemed most significant at the time was
what was featured in his October 22, 1995 article. That is, that he had a
very clear recollection of the “menacing-looking” man who stared at him from
one of the two cars he saw parked in the Fort Marcy lot, and a drawing based
upon Knowlton’s description accompanied Evans-Pritchard’s article. Even
more importantly we would learn later, the empty Honda with Arkansas license
plates that Knowlton saw there was quite different from Foster’s Honda,
according to his clear recollection, and the FBI reported that he had seen
Foster’s car.

The article hit U.S. newsstands on Tuesday,
October 24. I was working at the time only a block from a very good news
and magazine store on K Street next to a Farragut North subway entrance in
Washington, DC, which carried many foreign newspapers, including the Telegraph.
How exciting it was to read this extraordinary report that never made it
into the mainstream U.S. press in those days before the widespread use of the
Internet!

Two days later, on the morning of Thursday,
October 26, Knowlton received a subpoena to testify before Kenneth Starr’s
Whitewater grand jury. What happened that evening as Knowlton walked with
his girlfriend in the Dupont Circle neighborhood and the next night
Evans-Pritchard characterizes in his 1997 book, The
Secret Life of Bill Clinton, as “bizarre
beyond belief.” No written description that I could give here can compare
to the phone conversation between Evans-Pritchard and Irvine immediately after
the event (The “Chris” referred to is Christopher Ruddy.) Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE3-TxJajSA.

The Book
to Read

If you are going to read only one book on the
corruption of the Clintons and our enabling government and opinion-molding
institutions, it should be the one by Evans-Pritchard, not Hillary’s
Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy to Muzzle Internet Journalists, by Richard
Poe. Poe does have a very good account of the harassment suffered by
Knowlton as recounted below, but Evans-Prichard actually witnessed some of it,
and he has a whole chapter in his book on it, which he entitles “Street
Fascism.”

Most tellingly, even though he had finished
his book just before Starr released his final report on the Foster death and
Poe had much more time to reach a firm conclusion as to what Starr was all
about, Evans-Pritchard’s assessment is much more accurate and honest:

…there is [an] important point to understand
about Kenneth Starr. He is by character a servant of power, not a
prosecutor. One thing can be predicted with absolute certainty: He
will never confront the U.S. Justice department, the FBI, and the institutions
of the permanent government in Washington. His whole career has been
built on networking, by ingratiating himself. His natural loyalties lie
with the politico-legal fraternity that covered up the Foster case in the first
place. (p. 112)

Evans-Pritchard and his book have their
shortcomings. He may not trust or even glorify the Clintons’ conservative
critics as much as Poe, but he trusts them too much. In his “Street
Fascism” chapter he writes of the determined Knowlton, “He gave a sworn
deposition to Congressman Dan Burton, one of the few stalwarts on Capitol Hill
who refused to allow his independent judgment in the Foster case to be swayed
by mocking editorials.”

But that’s exactly what he did do when push
came to shove after he became a committee chairman. And, ironically enough, after encountering
difficulties in locating Patrick Knowlton because his name had been misspelled
by the Park Police, Evans-Pritchard spells Brett Kavanaugh’s name with a “C”
instead of a “K” and, like Poe, he leaves him out of his index, by whatever
spelling. In Evans-Pritchard’s or his publisher’s case, it’s probably
caused by mere inadvertence because John Bates and Miguel Rodriguez are there.
Why that is significant is explained in my original review of Poe’s book,
published on my web site September 9, 2007 and expanded on February 23, 2009.

The tip-off as to who is expected to read this
book is at the top of the dust jacket: "This
book is required reading,"it
says in bold italics. And right under the quote in bigger, bolder, all
capital letters is the name of the professional polarizer being quoted, none
other than Ann Coulter. With such a recommendation, the publisher is
assured that the only people likely to spend more than five minutes with the
book are hard core Fox News junkies. And Poe gives them a lot more raw
meat than Klein or even Coulter, herself, ever did.

Recall that I faulted Klein for pulling
his punches on Hillary Clinton's likely lesbianism and the various Clinton
scandals, particularly the death of Deputy White House Counsel, Vincent
Foster. Hillary's domestic life is not a topic of his book, so her sexual
orientation is, appropriately, not addressed.* As for the scandals, Poe
can hardly be said to have gone easy on Hillary. Though both Klein's and
Poe's books are aimed principally at conservatives, Poe's is obviously meant
for only a small subset of that audience. The giveaway is that Klein's book got
tons of publicity and Poe's book got absolutely none. I didn't even know
of the existence of Poe's book until I stumbled across it at a used book store
a couple of months ago, even though it actually mentions me and references my
"America's
Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster." It is safe for Poe to tell his readers about
some of the worst of the Clinton scandals, because only a very select group of
people who already hate the Clintons with a passion are likely ever to read it.

That is not to say that Poe tells the whole
truth. Far from it. His job is clearly to play right-wing shepherd
and to herd his assigned flock away from the corruption that envelopes both the
Democrats and the Republicans as well as our ruling media elite.

Poe describes a shocking manifestation of the
corruption in his apparent gloves-off treatment of the murder and cover-up in
the Foster case. Revealing more than journalistChristopher Ruddy, whom he praises to the skies and ridiculously likens to
Emile Zola in the Dreyfus case, he describes here the reaction of Kenneth
Starr's "investigative" team to the terrifying harassment** that the
inconvenient witness, Patrick Knowlton, whom British journalist Ambrose
Evans-Pritchard had ferreted out, received after being subpoenaed to
appear before a grand jury:

No one knows who ordered the harassment team
to begin its operation against Patrick Knowlton on October 26, 1995.
However, someone close to the Starr investigation must have tipped them off
that Knowlton had received a subpoena.

Throughout Knowlton's ordeal, Starr's team
treated the beleaguered witness with extraordinary contempt.

When the street harassment began, Knowlton
called the FBI and requested witness protection. Nothing happened for two
days. Finally, Agent Russell Bransford--the same FBI agent who had
delivered Starr's subpoena--showed up. "He had this smirk on his
face, as if he thought the whole thing was amusing," says Knowlton.
"I told him to get the hell out of my house."

At the same time Knowlton was calling the FBI,
Ruddy and Evans-Pritchard called Deputy Independent Counsel John Bates to
report the intimidation of a grand jury witness. Bates's secretary jotted
down some notes. "An hour later I called again," says
Evans-Pritchard. "She let out an audible laugh and said that her boss had
received the message...Bates never called back.

What did Starr's people find so funny about
the situation?

As a last resort, Knowlton prepared a
"Report of Witness Tampering" and took it personally to the Office of
the Independent Counsel. "It was their responsibility, at the very
least, to find out who leaked word of his subpoena," notes
Evans-Pritchard. According to Evans-Pritchard, John Bates responded by
calling security and having Knowlton removed from the building.

Perhaps the most telling indication of Starr's
attitude toward Knowlton is the humiliating cross-examination to which this
brave man was subjected before the grand jury. Knowlton says that he was
"treated like a suspect." Prosecutor Brett Kavanaugh appeared
to be trying to imply that Knowlton was a homosexual who was cruising Fort Marcy
Park for sex. Regarding the suspicious Hispanic-looking man he had seen
guarding the park entrance, Kavanaugh asked, Did he "pass you a
note?" Did he "touch your genitals?"

Knowlton flew into a rage at Kavanaugh's
insinuations. Evans-Pritchard writes that several African American jurors
burst into laughter at the spectacle, rocking "back and forth as if they
were at a Baptist revival meeting. Kavanaugh was unable to reassert his
authority. The grand jury was laughing at him. The proceedings were
out of control."

It was at that point, reports Evans-Pritchard,
that Patrick Knowlton was finally compelled to confront the obvious: "the
Office of the Independent Counsel was itself corrupt." (pp. 106-107)

Indeed it was, which explains how it could
come to the conclusion that Foster committed suicide in Fort Marcy Park against
the compelling testimony of Knowlton that the extra car in the park parking lot
was not that of the already dead Foster, plus a ton of additional
suicide-contradicting evidence.

Where Poe intentionally misleads us, to his
eternal discredit, has to do with the nature, the depth and breadth, and the
origin of the corruption of Starr and his team. Consistent with his
book's title and its general orientation, Poe would have us believe that the
Clintons were behind the cover-up and that George H.W. Bush's former solicitor
general, Kenneth Starr, went along with it out of simple timidity and
cowardice:

As Ruddy paints him, Starr was the sort of man
who makes police states work. He may well have been the decent fellow
whom his friends describe, upright and diligent in his work. But Starr
had a vice that outweighed all his virtues. He was a coward, so paralyzed
with fear in the face of naked evil that he would look the other way and
pretend not to see it. He was just the sort of man that Bill and Hillary
needed. (p. 103)

Actually, it's not quite that simple.
Really effective police states need effective propaganda that is believed by a
high percentage of the population. That's where the layers of propagandists,
from the mainstream journalists, to the Edward Kleins, the Ann Coulters, the
Christopher Ruddys, the Richard Poes, and the various "persecuted,"
"heroic," Internet journalists in Poe's book, Joseph Farah, Jim
Robinson, Matt Drudge, David Horowitz, and a host of others come in (entering
stage right, of course). And here's the proof of the pudding.

Note carefully the names of those two Starr
underlings involved in the harassment of the witness, Knowlton. They areJohn BatesandBrett Kavanaugh. On page 143 Poe says, not surprisingly, "Like
most Americans I support George W. Bush and his War on Terror." But
Poe conveniently neglects to tell his readers that this president, whom he
praises as a "decent, God-fearing man," has made federal judges--with
the approval of the United States Senate--of these two accomplices after the
fact of a high-level murder.

Poe's omission of this fact is surely
intentional. To impart this information would be to completely undermine
his simple-minded message aimed at simple-minded readers, that is, that the
deep, pervasive national corruption that he reveals in his book essentially
begins and ends with Bill and Hillary Clinton, and that his right-wing heroes
are free of the taint. His editors apparently recognized the risk he was
taking of giving the game away by telling us of the cover-up role of Bates and
Kavanaugh in the Foster murder, because neither name appears in the book's
detailed, extensive index.

Again, this omission could hardly be
unintentional. Even the brief mention of my "America's Dreyfus Affair" got my name into the index. Poe must be pretty
sure that the true believers who read his work are not going to go to the
trouble to track down my six-part Internet article and actually read it.
Were they to do so, they would see how his beloved "conservative"
crowd did as least as much as the hated, pro-Clinton liberals to cover up the
Foster murder. These includeAnn Coulter, FBI agent Gary Aldrich, and the late Barbara Olson, whom
Poe praises so highly in his book. On the role of conservatives in
particular, see "Vince Foster's Valuable
Murder." With this broader education,
one should not be at all surprised that George Bush should reward obstructers
of justice by giving them positions of great importance in our
"justice" system. Who is a nominal Democrat or Republican in
this corrupt apparatus is completely beside the point.

Finally, and again, not surprisingly, a name
that you will not find anywhere in either Poe's or Ruddy's account of the
cover-up of the Foster murder is that of George Bush's current head of the
Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. He was minority
counsel in the first Senate investigation related to the death of Vincent
Foster and majority special counsel in the second such Senate inquiry.
Readers can see how cleverly he labored to prevent the truth from getting out
at "Michael
Chertoff, Master of the Cover-up.

David Martin

September 9, 2007

* Poe later more than made up for that
omission in spades with his glowing review of Klein's phony Hillary attack book
onFrontPage
Magazine.

** For a detailed account of that harassment,
see thestatementthat Knowlton and his lawyer, John Clarke, prepared and a
3-judge panel had Kenneth Starr append to his report on Foster's death over
Starr's strenuous objections.

Addendum

It has been called to my attention that the
names of future federal judges John Bates and Brett Kavanaugh were not the only
ones strategically left out of the book's index. The long passage above
ends at the bottom of page 107. Here we pick up the narrative at the top
of page 108, without skipping a word. As you read it, see if you can guess
the name that didn't make the index:

Ken Starr's lead prosecutor Miquel [sic]
Rodriguez had reached that same conclusion seven months earlier (that Starr's
investigation was corrupt ed.). Starr hired him as a lead prosecutor in
September 1994. Soon after, Rodriguez was told that he was expected to
back up the conclusion of the earlier Fiske report—that
Foster had committed suicide. Rodriguez refused. He insisted on
conducting a real investigation. But the harder he tried, the more
resistance he got from Starr's team.

The last straw came on January 5, 1995, when
the Scripps Howard News Service ran a story claiming that "sources
familiar with the Starr inquiry," said that Kenneth Starr was ready to
announce that Vincent Foster "committed suicide for reasons unrelated to
the Whitewater controversy."

Rodriguez was furious. He had just begun
grand jury proceedings the day before. Who on earth would have leaked the
news that the probe was finished? Rodriguez stuck it out for a few more
weeks but finally resigned in March, returning to his former job as assistant
US attorney in Sacramento. "As an ethical person, I don't believe I
could be involved with what they were doing," he told Ruddy.

Rodriguez's sudden resignation could have
exploded in scandal. But Big Media virtually ignored it. Indeed,
Rodriguez claims that he tried to go public with his story, giving extensive
interviews to reporters fromTime,
Newsweek,ABC'sNightline,theBoston Globe,theAtlanta Journal-Constitution,and the NewYork Times. Rodriguez says he spent six hours with theNew York Timesreporter
alone. To all of them, Rodriguez told the same story: Starr's probe of
Vincent Foster's death was a sham.

"I was told what the result [of the Starr
investigation] was going to be from the get-go," Rodriguez later said in a
taped conversation, excerpted inWorldNetDaily.com. "This is all so much nonsense; I knew the
result before the investigation began, that's why I left. I don't do
investigations to justify a result."

None of the news organizations that
interviewed Rodriguez aired or published his account. Several reporters
admitted to Rodriguez that their editors had spiked the story. Rodriguez
also claims that FBI agents bullied him, making threats against his
"personal well-being," if he did not shut up. "The FBI
told me back off, back down. I have been communicated with again and been
told to be careful where I tread," says Rodriguez.

To this day, Rodriguez still serves as an
assistant US attorney in Sacramento.

You guessed it. The additional name
missing from the index is "Miguel Rodriguez." Book editors,
like newspaper editors, can be leaned upon.

Knowlton and his lawyer supplied three more
tapes to World Net Daily, and the reporter promised a follow-up story, but none
was ever forthcoming. You can read the transcripts of the additional
tapes, which came from telephone conversations with Reed Irvine of Accuracy in
Media, athttp://www.fbicover-up.com/Miquel/Miquel.htm.

David Martin

February 23, 2009

You can listen to the Rodriguez recordings here. You can also have a very depressing experience by
reading the customers’ reviews of Poe’s book here. Everyone, it would seem, with the exception of the
present writer, has gone for the bait. None of the people who loved the
book—which includes almost all the reviewers—have noticed the book’s essential
treachery. Poe wants them to believe that their salvation lies with
“conservatives,” almost all of whom pulled their punches on the numerous Clinton
scandals. He also expects that they will not notice the smooth continuity
in policy from Clinton to Bush to Obama when it comes to the important matters
of foreign policy, Wall Street, immigration, civil liberties, and endemic
corruption, including the unpunished—nay, the rewarded—corruption of the
Clintons. The Poe believers have swallowed it all hook, line, and sinker,
while a couple of “liberal” reviewers have panned the book without reading it,
letting the rest of their cohorts have gone off to swallow their own rat poison on
PBS.